Jennifer Davis

Jennifer Davis was good at her job. After a decade spent caring for people with Alzheimer’s and dementia, she was accustomed to the job’s demands: draining catheters, lifting patients, stretching sleeves to fit stiff limbs. Yet in 2014 she was struggling to find work.

Jennifer, 32, now works full-time as a nursing assistant, owns a car, and regularly feeds her teen daughter’s college fund. And she is optimistic. She started a training course this week, to add blood-drawing to her list of skills. She hopes to become a nurse.

Job counselors at the EFC aided Jennifer in 2014, when she was a struggling PCA – and ever since.

Her progress has followed a combination of hard work and professional support, two pieces that often come together at the EFC.

It also highlights another factor that is rare: continuity.

***

Since coming to the EFC, Jennifer has had several health care jobs: PCA, CNA, and now phlebotomist.

When Jennifer first met Lisa Gallant, an EFC employment coach, Lisa handed her a pair of scissors and a stack of magazines. She asked Jennifer to illustrate her future.

“She said, ‘In three years, what will your life look like?’” Jennifer recalls.

Jennifer had recently left Chicago, where she accumulated, from age 17, a network of clients. She knew almost no one in St. Paul. Without a reputation, she needed a new edge.

“I said, ‘I want to become a certified nursing assistant.’”

Beside cutouts of a house and car, she pasted a nurse on her poster board.

Jennifer gained more from that meeting than clear goals. After she completed her poster, Lisa referred her to a free CNA training course.

Soon Jennifer was employed full-time at a group home, unencumbered by debt. But with time, she gained new concerns.

First her daughter was diagnosed with diabetes.

“Sometimes [her blood sugar] would get so low, she’d be hospitalized, and I’d have to call off work,” Jennifer says. “And it’s very challenging because [my patients] still need taking care of. There’s not an hour when they don’t.”

Jennifer was tugged in multiple directions. And while she understood her patients’ ailments well, she knew frustratingly little about her daughter’s.

“The [doctors] took needles and drained her blood into different-colored bottles. All the tests they were giving her, I didn’t have a clue what they were for. It made me kind of furious.”

Jennifer was concerned about her daughter’s health, and her own. Her CNA duties ranged from cooking for patients to carrying them. It was strenuous work.

“You’re dealing with people who not only have dementia but also Parkinsons, where their muscles contract, and you’re lifting them and turning. Even if you lift them the right way, if you make a wrong step, oh it’s over.”

Jennifer injured her back twice. The first injury, a dislocated tailbone, was minor. But the second limited her movement for six months.

“That was a real wake-up call,” she says. “I only get one back.”

***

On Friday morning, we meet Jennifer at Maplewood Mall. The store, Scrubs Direct, is stocked with stethoscopes in glass cases and racks of loose blue pants. Jennifer waits for us by the cash register, her selections – a white lab coat, scrubs, clogs, safety glasses – bagged but unpurchased. Bill Allexsaht, an EFC job coach, swipes a credit card and keeps the receipt.

Jennifer returned to the EFC recently in search of a career change. Today she’s preparing for her first day of phlebotomy class at Century College, a local technical college that offers health care certifications.

“I’m going to be a vampire,” she says with a laugh.

The switch, from lifting patients to sampling their blood, will be good for her back, she says. It also promises insight into her daughter’s diabetes treatment.

From Maplewood Mall, the three of us drive to Century College. We locate the phlebotomy lab (not to be confused with the cosmetology lab, lined with mannequin heads, next door). We also stop by an administrative office to meet the director of health care programs, who Bill telephones regularly.

“I would know that voice anywhere!” Lynnette Lancor-Wies says. She hugs Bill and offers Jennifer a free copy of the phlebotomy class workbook.

***

Jennifer is planning a sequel to her first vision board, which is now three years old.

“Everything I put on that vision board I’ve succeeded at,” she says. “So I’m thinking about the next three years. I want to be working in phlebotomy, go back to school for my nursing degree, and have a college fund prepared for my child when it’s time for her to graduate.”

Ideally, the EFC will help Jennifer achieve those goals. But unlike Jennifer, the EFC can’t plan much further than a year. That’s because it depends on grants, which are increasingly short-term.

The EFC’s services have been shaped and reshaped during the past five years by annual grants from the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. Each grant has had a common goal: help poor people accumulate money by finding better jobs and using their wages wisely.

But the structure LISC prescribes has shifted twice. As a Financial Opportunity Center, the EFC helped job-seekers in various industries. The Occupational Skills Initiative mandated narrower focus, so the EFC focused on health care in 2013. Following the latest grants, for Bridges to Career Opportunities, the EFC has continued to narrow its offerings.

Those changes haven’t affected Jennifer, who was interested in health care all along. But many job seekers have been left behind.

Thanks to a new grant from the Department of Employment and Economic Development, the EFC will soon widen its focus again. It will offer trainings for a general audience of job-seekers – for the next year.

Jennifer has accumulated, over three years, skills that are highly attractive to employers, according to Lancor-Wies. Phlebotomists and CNAs are in high demand, and Jennifer is both.

Jennifer has also improved her credit score, a notoriously slow process, with help from financial counselors.

Foremost, her success illustrates our potential at the EFC to change lives – over time.